So I haven’t been blogging that much lately, and I’m sorry for that. I’ve been real busy planning this move to Florida.

Anyway, two weeks ago I wrote part 4 of my iTunes series for DJ Tech Tools. Its about using the new smart playlist features introduced in iTunes 9 to make your playlists even smarter. Check it out here.

If you DJ with a Mac, I highly suggest you check out this article that I wrote for DJ Tech Tools about optimizing your mac and using Automator to do it with one click.

Its no secret that I love Apple computers. For the last 1 1/2 years I’ve been faithfully using my 15 inch Macbook Pro, which has served me well. But last week Apple upped the ante by transforming their 13 inch offering into a Macbook Pro. I never owned a powerbook, but always figured it would have been sweet to have one of those fabled 12 inch models. Well this is the modern day equivilent.

The unibody degin was cool when it first came out, but the guts were esentially the same as before. Obviously I need a fairly powerful machine for perforing live with, and my 2.2 ghz MBP did that very well, but I have been wanting a smaller machine ever since I first bought my wife a 13 inch white macbook last year. Now i get the best of both worlds. At 2.26 ghz the entry level 13 inch MBP is actually faster than my current 15 incher. Firewire was brought back after a brief exile, which I love, and the non-removable battery shows crazy performance ungrades when compared with previous models.

I ordered one right way and let me tell you it is awesome. On day one I transfered all my stuff to the new one via time machine back up and cracked the case to install 4GB of Crucial ram. Apple still charges too much for ram, although the price isn’t as crazy as before, and I’ve always had good experiences with Crucial. Since then its been great.

I’ve even put the old one up on ebay. If you are in the market for a lovingly used 15 inch MBP, you can check it out here.

Norton and McAfee secretly teamed up to create malware for OS X in order to sell copies of their anti-virus software. At least that is the completely unfounded internet rumor I just made up, for no reason other than to see what will happen.

Seriously though, there have been a few reports of virus and malware activity over the last year on the Mac platform so stay safe!

… and Cadillacs are more expensive than Chevys. To each his own…

After making the change and rebooting I was finally able to select sleep with put the mouse:

Notice the blue ring around restart? Now all you need to do is tab once to sleep and then press the spacebar to select. Very helpful.

I couldn’t find clear info on it anywhere, but did finally get a suggestion to scrap Automator and try using Script Editor, another useful app that comes w/ your Mac. I fired it up, clicked record and then did my keystrokes. I then clicked stop and here were the results:

tell application “Finder”
     activate
     clean up Finder window 1 by name
end tell

I then did a “save as” and selected “application bundle”. Don’t ask me why but “application bundle” was faster than “application” in the execution of the script. Anyway, there you have it try the simple solutions first. I got hung up on the fact that I was going to have to code this one and it turned out that solution was much less complicated than i was making it.

What was the purpose of this? I took the application bundle and put it in my Finder toolbar, so now I have the ability to sort by name with a single click.